I'm not a particularly advanced student, but I took an introductory class using Lax and then later material with an algebraist professor and her notes. I strugg

I'm not a particularly advanced student, but I took an introductory class using Lax and then later material with an algebraist professor and her notes. I struggled with both, but I found it difficult to understand Lax's material until I was introduced to Galois/Invariant Theory and it all became much more clear. With the notes I used in the latter class I felt I gained a very deep understanding in return for my efforts, especially because they went into Complexification and bilinear/sesquilinear forms which gave me a really strong intuition on the geometry of matrix representations both real and complex. If I remember correctly, Lax didn't really focus on those concepts Not that Lax is a bad book but I feel like Lax's Linear Algebrs is actually a sneaky way of familiarizing the reader with formalisms they'll encounter in later, more abstract material, so maybe better for students who are already comfortable with a certain amount of abstraction so they're able to gain enough to leverage it later but not necessarily for a truly introductory class.